


Oh god it's the old times

by dyingpoet



Category: Dead Poets Society (1989)
Genre: Canon Era, Fluff and Angst, M/M, if your parent has never kicked you out of the car during an argument did you even have a childhood?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-28
Updated: 2018-05-28
Packaged: 2019-05-14 23:12:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,518
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14779097
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dyingpoet/pseuds/dyingpoet
Summary: Neil finds himself on the side of the road and it's 1959, so he has to physically find a payphone and call someone to come and rescue him





	Oh god it's the old times

**Author's Note:**

> Read the title like John Mulaney said it in "Kid Gorgeous" or the entire aura of this fic is lost

_ Summer 1959. Neil Perry watches as his parents car disappears over a hill, kicking up dust behind it. A gust of wind blows said dust back in his face, and Neil coughs. He is unsure of when he got into the habit of thinking like the opening monologue of a Shakespeare production, but his participation in a Shakespeare production seems like a decidedly convincing factor.  _

_ His father’s order to get out of the car had significantly less poetic, and the cinematic thought process was unable to write it into the story effectively. Stop it Neil. _

“Well, okay then.”

Neil managed to pull himself out of his looping thoughts and focus on the fact that he had been kicked out of their car. And also harbored the sinking feeling that this wasn’t a joke and he was either going to have to walk home (unattractive) or find a phone and have somebody besides his father pick him up (attractive).

The nearest payphone was only half mile down the road, and honestly, he was seventeen years old and had very little personal freedom, a walk through the great Vermont wilderness sounded nice

Besides considering where he had gone wrong in the conversation leading up to his subsequent removal from the family motor vehicle, Neil took this wonderfully silent time to quietly reflect. Meditate even. The whole experience was very zen.

_ Summer 1959 is so vague that the narrator has decided to go back for a reversionary period and be more specific _ .  _ Said narrator is starting his downward trek through what some may call a wooded area, pine trees crowding the shoulder of the road and nearly blocking out the picturesque view of the Appalachian mountains. Horseflies are native to the area and have come back from the depths of hell, where they belong, to assault the narrator, and externally motivate him to get out of the forest and to a payphone, before he lies down in the middle of the road and accepts his grim fate.  _

Out of breathe, Neil finally left the wooded straight and crossed his hands on top of his head, squinting his eyes against the sunlight as their small neighboring town opened up in front of him. 

It was a sight for sore eyes and he actually made a point of waving to the few people walking to and from the couple of stores on the sole grounds that they were not related to him, and had not kicked him out of a car in the middle of the an insect infested hellscape. 

The bit of shade felt nice as he got under the awning of their local bank and leaned against the wall next to the payphone. He needed fifty cents and a person with reliable transportation to call. Charlie was in California for the summer and Meeks with him, the rest of the guys lived too far away and/or didn’t have licenses.. 

Actually, scratch that, one of his friends  _ did  _ have the latter, and what he’d emphatically described to Neil as, ‘nothing to do, ever.’

Todd Anderson it was. 

He doled out another two waves while putting his change in the slot and dialing the Anderson’s number, hoping to god that ‘not doing anything’ was done sitting near a phone, or at least within earshot of one. 

After the fourth ring that assertion was proven to be true. 

_ “Hello?” _

“Todd!”

_ “...yeah?” _

Neil smiled and let his forehead rest against the brick wall behind the payphone, he could feel the awkwardness through the telephone line and it was  _ radiant _ .

“Hey, it’s Neil.”

_ “Oh, hi! What’s, um, going on?” _

God if he knew. “Well, as it were, I’m sort of stranded in the wilderness.”

_ “And you’re calling me from?” _

“The wilderness Todd, keep up.”

A staticy chuckle reverberating from the other end of the line, they fell back into banter easily enough after being a couple months out of practice. 

_ “So what really happened?” _

“I got into an argument with my father,” Neil said, “He kicked me out of the car and I don’t really feel like walking back home to, all that.” 

He gestured vaguely at the brick wall and hoped that his tone wasn’t lost in the phone lines. The less he thought about their argument, the better. Right now he just wanted to enjoy the nostalgic conversation with his friend and beg him for ride, hopefully snowballing to a day out of the house far from his local source of parental stress.

_ “Sorry Neil-” _

“Don’t be!” he said quickly, “I just, is there anyway you could pick me up? If you can’t it’s okay, I’m in Chester by the bank-”

_ “Give me half an hour, tops.” _

Neil smiled and raked a hand through his hair, he would have kissed Todd if he were present and in a more opened minded area of the United States. 

“Thanks Todd.”

_ “Don’t worry about it.” _

* * *

 

_ The sun was starting to fall below the treeline and our narrator found himself once more damning all insect life to hell as he squatted at a lone mosquito near his face. It had been twenty minutes since he had gotten off the phone with Todd Anderson, a well developed character in the tragedy that was The Life of Neil Perry, and he was starting to tire of waving to random natives of the town.  _

_ Unbeknownst to most, the topic of Neil’s thoughts at that moment were not of the decidedly fantastic friend on the way to his rescue, but on the fact that he had nothing to lose. Nihilistic outlook for a teenager? Yes. Unrealistic? No. _

Neil barely manager to bite back a smile when Todd’s car pulled up to the side of the road, stopping suddenly and jerking its driver forward when he saw Neil sitting on the curb. 

He was in the passenger seat and pulling on his seatbelt before Todd could get out a ‘hello’.

“The wilderness, huh?” 

Todd started the car back up and started back the way Neil had walked down from. “Yep, I got dangerously close to heat stroke and fought off a mountain lion to save a small child.”

“Eventful.”

Todd’s mouth turned up in a half smile and Neil’s broke into a full blown one, god he’d missed this. Even the silence that stretched between them for a few minutes as they started through the wooded straight was familiar and light, it was like they’d just graduated the night before. 

“So,” Todd started, “Where are we going?”

They both had enough sense of direction to know that if they ept on this road long enough they would actually pass Neil’s house, and the obligation to get out and face the music would return. They didn’t really have that many other options for deviation the longer they drove. 

“To the side of the road.”

Todd frowned and looked over at Neil, head tilted in that way it would whenever someone would try and explain trig to him. It drew a laugh out of Neil.

“Just pull over.”

Once the car reached a full stop Neil unbuckled and got out, quickly and wordlessly followed by Todd. Moving to sit on the hood of the car, the comedy of the situation got to be too much and Neil bust out laughing.

“What?”

Todd’s confused look just threw him deeper into hysterics and it took him a good minute or so to calm down and be able to respond properly. 

“This is so…” Neil snapped his fingers and tried to find the right word.

The poet cut in. “Cinematic?”

“Yes!” Neil said with another bark of laughter, “God it’s like some weird Peter Weir film about the coming of age in America.”

“You make a pretty good leading man.”

“The setting sort of sucks though,” Neil said, gesturing at the almost inky blackness of the woods surrounding them, “Not enough color.”

Todd shrugged, “Low budget I guess.”

They went back and forth for a while after that, neither of them addressing anything that happened prior to Neil calling Todd from the payphone, they didn’t really see the point. It was summer, it was their last real summer, and as boys are wont to do, they talked about anything and everything to keep from talking about one specific thing. 

Even when they grew silent again, Neil didn’t even think about the implications of him grabbing Todd’s hand and just lying there. They’d done it before, in the dark, in a dorm room, and the gesture felt just as pure as the first time it happened. 

“Thanks Todd.”

“Don’t mention it.”

* * *

 

_ Alas, as our final scene comes to an end, and the well anticipated sequel of The Life of Neil Perry begins its casting process, the narrator finds himself alone on his bed during the last summer of his childhood. And, after surviving his night with surprisingly little parental repercussions, Neil Perry had found one thing he had to lose, one person actually. _

_ This realization rang in the narrator’s ears as the this day in the summer of 1959 came to, what some may call an anti-climactic, end.  _

**Author's Note:**

> This is probably the most sarcastic thing I have ever written and I am so for it whether you guys like it or n o t
> 
> Kudos and comments are the only thing keeping me alive and ready with these topical comedic references, so hmu with some :)


End file.
